The author Edgar Allen Poe was mostly horror works and he inspired horror authors of today. In many of Poe’s works, he features an animal that is usually darker in color, that usually represents the main character’s deteriorating mindset because of the way they react to the animals, like speaking to the animal, thinking they are talking to them and thinking the animal is taunting them with its presence. His use of darker and less popular animals shows his character’s growing madness within them, he shows this deterioration through a cat, a raven, and a serpent. In his work, “The Black Cat,” he uses cats to show the growing insanity of the main character. After he attacks and kills his first cat he finds another, “It was a black cat—a very large one—fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast” (Poe 8). The cat he had maimed and killed was named Pluto, after his house burned down he saw a part of the wall that had not burned with the rest of the house, in the shape of a cat with a noose around its neck. He pushed the incident aside …show more content…
In many works, both religious and regular literature, the serpent has been the representation of the devil. This work is no exception, the serpent in the family’s crest is biting into the heel and getting its head smashed by the foot. This crest is symbolic of what happens to Fortunato, he wounds Montresor’s pride, and in the end Fortunato can be embodied as the snake biting into the heel, while being distracted by